Urbanism, Architecture, Planning: How Second Life Can Help Build the Urban Landscape of the Physical World--and Vice Versa. Municipal, government and private organizations around the world struggle to design new projects that serve their communities and harmonize with the urban landscape and infrastructure. But it's hard to convey vision to stakeholders, socialize aspects of design and achieve consensus. Today's panel describes how they're using Second Life to present, test, collaborate about, and socialize design in real architectural and engineering applications.

showcase how they are bringing real science into the community of Second Life. In the form of an open discussion with audience Q&A, we hope to engage the everyday resident in science and inspire new ideas for science in Second Life for the future.

This talk will be about the rapid expansion of German educational activities in SL. Jean Linden from Linden Lab will open with a keynote on international projects in SL and offer first hand insights. Bernd Schmitz (Bernd Celt) of the University of Applied Science Cologne has been the first German educator to start a 3D presence and orientation activities in SL. Michael Lange of Metaversa (Ziggy Moonflower) is one of the few Germans with projects on the teen grid. Matthias Rückel (Dia Diqui) of time4you focuses on SL as a an e-learning platform and a learning space for companies. Torsten Reiners (Tyke McMillan) manages the SL activities of University of Hamburg, first in Germany to start their own sim. Hanno Tietgens of Buero X Media Lab will give an update on the collaborative Campus Hamburg initiative and long distance learning projects with TUEV NORD. Hanno will also be moderating the talk. The presentations and discussion will be held in English on a *first come first served* basis.

The next obvious step in the evolution of virtual worlds is using them as the front-end display for data applications, making them alive with information, streaming in data and representing it visually. This session features several innovative data visualization applications from enterprise and academia. The virtual worlds data visualization community is organized though a wiki (http://sldataviz.pbwiki.com/) and the Data Visualization group in Second Life which collaborates and displays tools at the open source data viz island located in the SciLands (http://slurl.com/secondlife/SciLands/170/92/28).

10

Lernen mit Spass in der Volkshochschule - Have Fun learning in the German adult education centre

Classes that bring fun in your SL Life and where all 3D- possibilities that SL offers, are used to create an interesting learning unit.This is our speciality. We won the European e-learning Award eurelea 2008 (www.eurelea.org) with our SL-concept and would like to show you why. Please activate your SLVoice. No micro necessary. Being able to listen is enough.

M will be addressing teens in TSL, recognizing the great work they've been doing as well as organizations like Global Kids. Moderated by Blue Linden, he'll also be answering some of their questions and concerns about TSL. The session will be done in chat, and transcripts will be made available as soon as possible

'Coming of Age in Second Life' shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.

Second Life is full of features and services ready to be explored. Our panel will introduce information about Groups, Content Creation, as well as Educational Resources and how they relate. Join our casual gathering of Q&A and enhance your in-world experience.

The "Resident Help Groups and New User Experience" panel (Saturday, July 5th, 6pm SLT) will focus on how resident help groups (such as NCI/New Citizens Incorporated or The Shelter) play a critical part in teaching and retaining new SL residents. We will discuss how resident help groups relate to the Linden Lab's official Mentor group, and the advantages and disadvantages of running an independent group. We will also touch on Linden Lab's new "Resident Help Network" initiative. Panelists will include Carl Metropolitan (NCI/New Citizens Incorporated), Sumar Morgan (The Shelter), Prokofy Neva (Ross InfoHub), Orhalla Zandar (SL Hobos & Caletta InfoHub), and Gentle Heron (Heron Sanctuary Welcome Center & Virtual Ability)

Capping off the business, healthcare, education and training week of SL5B, Linden Lab board member Mitch Kapor will deliver a keynote address about Second Life as a disruptive technology platform. In addition to SL as a creative, social space, we are now seeing broader uses for education, philanthropy, art, fashion, medical research, architecture and design, science, and entertainment. Many people around the world are making a living on creative work they love doing in Second Life.

In this roundtable we’ll be discussing the advancements made in language teaching and language teacher training over the past two years and considering the core skills needed to get started, as well as approaches, tools and content that work well in SL. Our mixed panel includes teachers, teacher trainers and materials designers and we look forward to a lively debate followed by even livelier audience discussion.

19

Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds

7/7/2008

1pm PT

Jean Linden

Tori Horton (Project Manager for the Network Culture Project at the USC Annenberg School for Communication), Joshua Fouts (Director at Dancing Ink Productions who has partnered with Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs on "Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds."), Lowisa Williams/William May (US State Department running projects in Second Life), Evan Potter, Stefan Geens (from the Swedish Institute, Stefan manages Sweden's Virtual Embassy in Second Life) and Hamlet Au, aka Wagner James Au, one of the foremost writers on the emerging society of Second Life and the next generation of the Net, he is the author of *The Making of Second Life*

With a global 3D platform that enables the sharing of information and culture, crossing national boundaries, is Second Life the next frontier for public diplomacy? What kind of projects enable the sharing of experience and discussion of international issues? What kind of innovation and solutions could this foster? Our expert panelists include:Tori Horton, Director of the "Second Life and the Public Good, Community Challenge" project through USC's Annenberg School for Communication; Christopher R. Keesey, Project Manager for Marketing and Learning Applications at Ohio University Without Boundaries division; William May, Public Diplomacy IT Office Director responsible for PD and applied/new technology at the US State Department; Lovisa Williams, Senior Technology Adviser and leading the department's presence within Second Life at the US State Department; and Evan Potter, U.S. Canada Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy, 2008 at USC's Center on Public Diplomacy, and Stefan Geens from the Swedish Institute, who manages Sweden's Virtual Embassy in Second Life. Second House of Sweden. We're also joined by Hamlet Au, aka Wagner James Au, Formerly Hamlet Linden, the author of the book *The Making of Second Life* (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061353205?tag=newwornot-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0061353205&adid=0A0N9QH387HSFTNJY2WP) and the ongoing blog New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com), whose ongoing mission is to cover Second Life as an emerging society and the next generation of the Net. The group will be discussing their work and how it will change the world.

20

Connecting our brains to virtual worlds: An introduction of an assistive technology for the physically challenged

In this talk we will be introducing a brain-machine interface technology which allows one to control their avatar movements in the virtual world of Second Life. This technology was developed for people suffering with motor dysfunction and has now been successfully tested on actual patients in collaboration with a few domestic hospitals. Based on numerous findings in Neurosciences, have succeeded in electronically obtaining intentions of turning left and right, and foot motions, from the surface of a subject’s head via electrodes. An originally developed signal processing algorithm and a system-on-a-chip circuit automatically translates these electronic motor intentions to the USB keyboard signals, which then controls the avatar movement. During this presentation we will be showing a sample movie demonstrating a person with myopathy controlling his Second Life avatar using his brainwaves